Oathbreakers of New Makassar

By Fendy S. Tulodo

At recess, Etu was sentenced to exile for asking a question. The tribunal of twelve-year-olds ruled swiftly, their glowing badges pulsing with inherited authority. It wasn’t the question itself that broke protocol. It was where he asked it: in front of the holo-map of Earth’s last border war, the one labeled Do Not Inquire.

The question had been simple.

“Why didn’t the southern resistance fire back?”

Silence had answered him first, followed by three gasps and one recorder ping. That was enough. A dozen prefects stepped forward. They scanned his optic tag, flagged his record, and escorted him to the Empty Wing. By noon, his desk had vanished from the registry.

Nobody spoke to Etu again that day.

The Empty Wing was cold, lit by a dim central strip that buzzed every few seconds. There were no lesson tracks here, no empathy rehearsals or virtue loops. Just a long metal hall and a quiet, heavy air, as if even the oxygen didn’t want to disturb anything.

Etu sat cross-legged against the far wall, still wearing his soft-regulation uniform, which had started to itch along the neck seam. He had no idea how long he’d be here. The teachers wouldn’t say. The prefects said he had been removed for ideological inconsistencies.

Outside the thick wall-pane, he could see the curve of New Makassar’s horizon. Rings of a shattered moon glittered in the distance, circling slowly. Earth was not visible, not from this orbit, but its shadow lived in the curriculum. They were all raised on its history. Some parts sung, some parts hidden. That was how the Accord worked.

Etu reached into his pocket. The prefects had missed a small fold of paper — real paper — which he had copied by hand from an old exercise module. It contained a name: Yara Rofidah, Southern Commander, Age 14, Final Order: Disarm. The name wasn’t searchable. It had been scrubbed.

He read it again. Why would someone give a final order to disarm? In the last battle? Why would a fourteen-year-old even be in command?

The logic didn’t align. And Etu, once known for perfect test scores, couldn’t let that stand.

On the second day of exile, a visitor came.

She didn’t knock. The door just hissed open, and a girl walked in carrying a scanner slate with a cracked corner. Her hair was buzzed unevenly, eyes sharp, uniform belt loosened and sagging. She looked maybe fifteen. Too old for Etu’s level.

“You’re the question boy,” she said, not unkindly.

“You’re… not a prefect.”

“Observant. Good. I’m Lira.”

He stared at her. “Am I being reassigned?”

Lira shook her head, tapping her slate. “Not yet. You’re flagged as soft-critical. They’re still debating whether to reprogram or reorient you.”

Etu blinked. “Reprogram?”

“It’s like a soft-reset. Memory wipes, loop conditioning, maybe a patch implant. Depends on your scores.”

“They wouldn’t… I haven’t done anything wrong.”

“You asked about Yara Rofidah. That’s enough.”

She crouched beside him and placed the slate between them. “But you’re lucky. I collect questions.”

The slate opened with a sequence of flickers, then resolved into a grainy black and white recording. Static jumped across the image. A girl — Yara — stood in front of a ruined wall, uniform torn, hair plastered with dust. Behind her, dozens of children were setting their rifles on the ground.

No speech. No battle. No enemies.

Just children disarming themselves.

Etu leaned closer. “This isn’t in the archives.”

Lira nodded. “It was classified as subversive edit material.”

“Who gave you this?”

“Can’t say.” Her lips curved slightly. “But I have a theory. And I think you do too.”

Etu didn’t answer. He watched Yara Rofidah kneel, remove her badge, and press it into the dirt.

The badge was the same kind they all wore.

That night, Etu dreamed of the tribunal again. But this time, he wasn’t on trial. It was the instructors. Their holograms flickered. Their faces blurred. They kept repeating the phrase, Obedience ensures peace, but the sound was garbled, like a corrupted recording.

Lira stood beside him in the dream, arms crossed. “They don’t know you’re awake yet,” she said.

He woke up sweating.

The third day, Lira smuggled him out of the Empty Wing. They moved through maintenance ducts, past old waste dispensers and quiet light panels. Nobody patrolled these areas. The AI monitors had stopped working years ago, probably during one of the ion storms.

At the end of a forgotten tunnel, Lira keyed open a rusted door.

Inside was a room no student should have access to — a wild archive.

Stacks of physical drives, old terminals, and unconnected data strips lined the walls. In the center, a single projector sat wired into the floor, blinking.

“This is where history comes to rot,” Lira said. “Unless someone remembers.”

Etu stepped inside slowly. Every step echoed. Dust swirled in patterns from the weak vent.

“You asked why Yara ordered a disarm. What if it wasn’t surrender?” she said. “What if it was a rebellion?”

He looked at her.

“Not just against the Empire,” Lira added. “But against the idea of needing war to fix war.”

Etu swallowed. “But why cover it up?”

“Because it doesn’t fit. Peace through force was the Accord’s foundation. If peace came from refusing to fight, that makes everything we’re taught… fragile.”

Etu turned to the terminal. He felt his heartbeat in his ears.

“I want to show it,” he said.

“Show who?”

“Everyone.”

Lira tilted her head. “Dangerous.”

“I don’t care.”

“You should,” she said, but didn’t stop him.

Later that night, Etu prepared a data burst. The platform would be the Central Amphitheater, where Founding Day was to be celebrated the next morning. Every child, instructor, and supervisor would be tuned in. The amphitheater dome had a mainframe plug-in. One port. Lira had already mapped it.

“You’ll have ninety seconds before they shut it down,” she warned.

“Enough.”

“After this, you can’t undo it.”

Etu nodded. “Was there ever a forward?”

She didn’t answer.

Founding Day began with music. Pre-programmed, triumphant, and loud. Children marched in formation. Instructors recited the Oaths of Accord. All screens were tuned to the live feed. The dome sparkled with clean light.

Then it glitched.

A sharp buzz cracked across the sound system. One by one, the lights dimmed. The main feed was distorted, then cleared into a single image.

Yara Rofidah.

Standing. Silent. Placing her badge in the dirt.

No voice-over. No commentary. Just that action, looping once.

Then twice.

By the third loop, the children stopped reciting. Some sat down. Some removed their own badges. One girl in the front row started crying.

By the fourth loop, the instructors tried to cut the feed. But the burst was locked.

The fifth loop ended in silence.

Security found Etu an hour later, sitting near the maintenance port, waiting. He didn’t resist. He was escorted not to exile this time, but to the observation deck, where the central board waited.

He expected punishment.

Instead, the Director of Curriculum leaned forward.

“Who helped you?”

Etu said nothing.

Another supervisor spoke. “You understand what this means, right?”

“Yes,” Etu replied. “It means the truth works, even when you bury it.”

The Director sat back.

“We’ll be revising the Yara module. You’ll be monitored, of course. But… your status is restored.”

Etu stared. “That’s it?”

“For now.”

He was dismissed.

That evening, Lira was nowhere to be found. Her bunk was cleared. Her registry was offline. No one remembered her — not even the prefects. It was as if she’d never enrolled.

But in the corner of Etu’s slate, a new icon blinked.

A single folder labeled Historian of Error.

Inside: thousands of unsorted files. Dates, faces, actions that never made it into the Accord’s curriculum.

Etu opened the first one.

The work had only just begun.

By the next cycle, Etu had stopped being just a student. Quietly, under the observation of the Curriculum Board, he was given a new classification: Semi-autonomous Research Cadet, Low Risk, High Curiosity. It meant he was allowed back into the general population but would be watched closely.

What they didn’t realize was how much he had already seen. Or how deep the files went.

He kept Lira’s archive hidden in an old language module, coded under phoneme revision data. No one looked there anymore. The files weren’t just about Yara Rofidah. They included transcripts of unrecorded debates, children who had led uprisings, maps of rewritten borders, and even images of the old Earth before the final partition.

Each one chipped away at the single-story version of history the Accord had taught them.

And each one brought a new question.

Why were they still hiding the truth, even now?

Etu didn’t speak of Lira. It wasn’t safe. But her folder grew in his slate every day. Sometimes, he found new entries waiting for him, tagged without names. Footage of a playground turned training ground. An essay written in chalk on the inside of a solar panel. A voice recording of a student, breathless, whispering, We tried to vote. They erased the ballots.

It had no context. But it sounded like something real.

He started organizing the archive. Giving names to the nameless. Dates to the forgotten. Faces to the pixelated.

And he realized something strange. The patterns were not random. They repeated every nine years, almost exactly. New leaders. New refusals. New disappearances.

The cycle was old.

Older than the school.

Older than the orbital itself.

Three weeks after Founding Day, Etu was approached by a girl named Jameela.

She was from the outer ring cohort, usually trained in engineering logistics. Her fingers were calloused from tactile diagnostics. Her badge glowed green, marked for stability.

“I saw the Yara loop,” she said. “I’ve been waiting for someone to ask what it meant.”

Etu hesitated. “Are you monitored?”

“Everyone is. Doesn’t mean they listen.”

She sat beside him in the cafeteria, where the noise made small conversations hard to isolate. It was the safest place to talk. Ironically.

“I have blueprints,” she said. “From the first Earth border wall. They kept logs of power fluctuations during the truce week. Guess what? One side powered down early.”

“You’re saying the southern resistance never intended to fire.”

“I’m saying they couldn’t. They didn’t have the tech.”

Etu’s throat tightened. “So Yara’s final order wasn’t surrender. It was survival.”

Jameela nodded.

“They were out of power. They laid down arms because they had nothing left to shoot.”

The next phase came faster than expected. A second student broadcast—anonymous—was uploaded to the dome’s internal loop. It played during morning exercises.

This time, it wasn’t just a video. It was a timeline. A sequence of choices made by child commanders, each one contradicting the Accord’s version of events. Each one was labeled Suppressed for Moral Clarity.

The Board called it sabotage. The prefects doubled inspections. Dozens of slates were scanned, and three students were relocated.

But more questions followed.

What happened to the relocated?

Where was the evidence of their trials?

Why did the official database list their names under “Voluntary Transfers”?

Etu didn’t need to ask. He knew they were rewriting live records again.

Just like they did with Lira.

One night, while cataloging old mission data, Etu found a corrupted entry titled PROJECT CEDARLINE.

It took hours to repair. When he did, the file opened with a series of images—children inside a training simulation. Each wore battle gear. Each had a different flag stitched to their back. One Earth. One Makassar. One nameless.

The images were followed by voice transcripts. Evaluations. And one clear line:

“Continue protocol. Civilian empathy must remain non-operational during stage cycles.”

Etu stared at the phrase for a long time.

They weren’t just hiding history.

They were removing emotion.

By now, whispers had spread. A full sixth of the student population began acting oddly—asking strange questions, changing badge orientations, quoting lessons that had never been taught in the current cycle. The instructors tightened the structure, but the shifts continued.

Etu began to receive notes.

Slipped under trays. Embedded in memory assignments. Carved into the corner of cleaning bots.

We see you.
More than one Yara.
The next disarm won’t be quiet.

He knew what that meant.

They weren’t just learning the truth.

They were planning.

The dome’s reactor malfunctioned during a routine diagnostic. That was the official report. In reality, someone had triggered a controlled disruption—enough to reset the internal systems for exactly four minutes.

During those four minutes, the entire curriculum was overridden.

Not with propaganda.

But with stories.

Thousands of them.

Children telling what they remembered. What they’d been told to forget. Audio files, pictures, letters to invisible siblings. A wave of reality, raw and painful.

Some were crude.

Some poetic.

But none of them followed the Accord’s rules.

By the time the system came back online, the amphitheater had gone quiet.

And stayed that way.

For a full minute, not a single student moved.

Then one boy stood and said, “My brother died for a version of peace I don’t believe in.”

He removed his badge.

Others followed.

A slow, deliberate unfastening of symbols.

No slogans. No shouts.

Just children refusing the weight of false memory.

Etu knew what would happen next. The system would adapt. It always did. A new directive. New rules. New scapegoats. And the illusion would try to rebuild itself.

But this time, something had changed.

This time, the archive wasn’t a secret anymore.

Jameela had shared the data across every cohort.

Lira’s folder had been re-uploaded under a new codename: Makassar Real.

And Etu?

He wasn’t hiding.

He walked into the board chamber and placed a hard drive on the central table.

“This is what we remember,” he said. “Try erasing us again.”

The board didn’t respond.

They just watched.

Maybe it was shock. Maybe resignation.

Or maybe, just maybe, they didn’t know what to do when a student broke the oath… without breaking the peace.

The next day, classes resumed.

New lessons. Real ones.

Some instructors resigned.

Others stayed, watching closely, saying little.

No arrests were made.

But at lunch, Etu noticed something different.

The youngest group—seven-year-olds—were drawing Yara’s face in their sketch modules.

Nobody stopped them.

In the margins of the main hallway, someone had scribbled a line in chalk.

Not obedience, but courage, ensures peace.

It wasn’t official.

But it was enough.

Enough for a new story to begin.